Hey There,
I have done over a hundred interviews on my show. And the pattern I see consistently in the people who have been deep in the hustle for long enough is an emptiness that is very hard to call out while you are in it.
The revenue is real. The audience is real. The business is real. And they are miserable. Not secretly struggling while appearing successful. Genuinely, thoroughly, this-is-not-what-I-thought-it-was miserable.
Because hustle culture never asked them what they were actually built for. It just told them to go faster.
I went all the way in on this today. The difference between hard work, which I believe in completely, and hustle culture, which is an ideology that says your worth is your output and external metrics are the appropriate measure of a life. The neuroscience of why the external approval loop is a dopamine tolerance machine that requires bigger and bigger hits to produce the same satisfaction and never actually answers the question the self-concept is actually asking. How the course industry and the attention economy profit from keeping you in the optimization loop rather than asking whether the direction is right. The woman who built a seven-figure business and sat for a week with the question: if the revenue disappeared and nobody was watching, would you still do this. And what Jesus said when asked what the greatest commandment was, which dismantles the entire hustle framework in about twelve words.
The soul work exists. The thing you are built for exists. And when you find it, the hustle disappears because you are no longer looking for anything outside yourself to validate your existence.
Go listen. Then sit with the question the woman in the guest story sat with for a week.
brandenlanette.com